No ETA for when game goes back on sale, players recommended to request refunds.

Share this story

Warner Bros. has pulled the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight from sale due to "performance issues." While no date was given for when the game might be put back on sale, the publisher is promising to address the wide range of performance issues players are experiencing. Those who have already purchased the game can request a refund from Steam or the retail location where the game was purchased.

Earlier this week, users across Steam and reddit began reporting serious issues with the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight, including stuttering, wildly variable frame rates, and crashes. The problems are so bad that even those with high-end graphics cards like the GTX Titan X and GTX 980 Ti (myself included), are unable to run the game at a steady 60fps. Some AMD users are reporting frame rates in the single digits.

Arkham Knight's removal from sale follows a less-than-helpful post from Warner Bros. on Tuesday. While the company did acknowledge the game’s performance issues in the post, it simply re-iterated the recommended settings for certain hardware and suggested that players do not tamper with .ini files in order to remove the baffling 30fps cap. Suffice it to say, players were not pleased with Warner's suggestions.

The PC version's problems are particularly galling considering the hype surrounding the PC version's visuals—hype driven by Warner Bros. and Nvidia, which has its GameWorks technology in the game. This included a string of promotional videos that showcased features such as Interactive Fog and Smoke and Interactive Paper Debris that would not feature in the console version of the game.

Further Reading

While developer Rocksteady has kept relatively quiet during the fiasco, studio head Sefton Hill did confirm in a tweet earlier this week that the PC version of Arkham Knight was in fact a port handled by a third-party developer rather than Rocksteady itself. That developer, Iron Galaxy, is perhaps better known for its console work on games like the PS3 version of Destiny and the Xbox One's Killer Instinct, rather than PC.

Iron Galaxy also handled the PC port of Batman: Arkham Origins, a game that suffered from numerous bugs and performance issues at launch. While Warner says it's currently working on fixing the issues with Arkham Knight, its track record suggests that support may not continue for too long. Following the release of Arkham Origins and a patch that failed to fix all its problems, the publisher stated that the game would not receive further support because "the team is currently working hard on the upcoming story DLC... The issues that are not progression blockers will unfortunately no longer be addressed."